I put the hand back in its glove and held it as though we were shaking on a deal. The gesture was enough to bring back a sharp recollection of the past, and briefly the wooden hand turned into my hand in the cupboard, the one that had untied the bows on my dresses. I experienced then a strange jolt, not déjà vu but its opposite, a conviction that the way I had always remembered the hand might be wrong. What if I had seen this wooden hand at Pippa’s and had transferred it, in my imagination, to the boiler cupboard? The theory seemed plausible, but it didn’t resonate except in a cold, scientific way—and the hand in the cupboard had been neither of those things. It had been warm, as human and alive as I was. But how could that be?
One by one, I returned the objects to the tea chest and found that I was shaking. Discovering the mannequin hand had unnerved me to the core. Not just because it was creepy, but because it had rattled my sense of certainty that how I remembered the past was how it actually was. Now when I thought of the hand, my memories of it were unmoored.
I climbed into bed but saw that I hadn’t put away the tea chest. It was out in the middle of the room, and behind it, I had left the wardrobe doors wide open.
I had to put the tea chest away before morning, or risk Pippa seeing it, but there was something about the wardrobe that made me not want to go near it. The black space between the two open doors no longer seemed neutral, but pulsed with a presence that was strangely malevolent. Worse than that, it seemed to be exerting a magnetic pull.
Keeping one eye on the wardrobe, I hurried into the bathroom and closed the door behind me. What was I so afraid of? I tried to breathe it out, to talk myself down, and as I did so, I realized I was exhausted, worn out with anxiety—so much so that the floor between shower stall and sink looked inviting. When I lay down, I noticed how grubby it was, dirt crammed into the grooves between the tiles and tiny coils of hair behind the column that supported the sink. But with one glance I was able to take in the entire room, including both doors, firmly shut, and the thought of that was comfort enough to lull me into sleep.
I woke up when Caleb, in striped pajamas, walked into the bathroom, eyes sleepy, a hand clamped over his crotch. He didn’t see me until he had stumbled into my head. “Fuck!”
My embarrassment equaled his, and I rolled out of the way. “Sorry, I fell asleep.”
“In the bathroom?”
“I guess I must have been sleepwalking.” I had never sleepwalked in my life.
We returned to our rooms to regroup, then avoided each other for several days.
As a guest in Pippa’s house, I never quite felt sure where the boundaries were. She’d glibly told me on many occasions to make myself at home, but hadn’t meant it literally, as I discovered to my cost. The second or third morning I was there, I came downstairs to find a note pinned to the fridge telling me to help myself to food, except for the leftover lasagna, which was being saved for Caleb’s dinner. The note put me on edge, and from then on I was careful not to eat or drink too much, except for coffee, which I allowed myself almost unlimited quantities of. The disturbance in the wardrobe continued to bother me, and I spent two more fitful nights on the bathroom floor, and a third downstairs on the couch with the TV on low so as not to wake anyone. After a week of this, I was so utterly frazzled from accumulated sleep deprivation that I wasn’t sure if the disturbance had caused my insomnia or if it was the other way round. I didn’t mention anything to Pippa because I didn’t want her to think I was a nut job; if that happened, I’d be out on the street.
One night I got back from a walk in the park—I had been trying to wear myself out with exercise—to find Pippa wrestling with a basket of washing. She was trying to separate Caleb’s socks and underwear from Ari’s slightly bigger ones, and when she said, “It’s make your own dinner night, the servants are on strike,” I thought she meant I hadn’t been pulling my weight around the house.
Downstairs in the kitchen, Ari told me to help myself to baked beans, which he’d heated up in a pot on the stove. “Finish them up,” he said, handing me a bowl and pointing to a loaf of sliced bread for toasting. I ate in the living room, watching TV with Ari, and just as I was finishing, Alana finally returned one of the dozens of calls I had made to her mobile.
“I’m sorry it’s taken me so long,” she said. “I’ve been terrifically busy.”
“Me too,” I said, though the opposite was true. I tried to arrange another outing, but Alana was booked up, and sounded stressed. “Is everything okay?” I said. “Is it Steve?”
“Steve? No, he’s great.” She softened. “Actually, he’s lovely. He took me to Paris for the weekend.”
“Wow, he didn’t seem like the romantic type.”
“Exactly what type did he seem like,” she said, unexpectedly sharply, “to you?”
I had offended her, in a way that wasn’t easy to put right. “He seemed nice,” I said. “Really nice. A top bloke.”
“You never liked nice,” she said.
The edge was still in her voice, but as I opened my mouth to defend myself, Alana cut me off.
“I was going to get it over with the other night,” she went on. “But you were so drunk I didn’t see the point.”
“I’m sorry about that,” I said, wincing. “I was excited about hanging out with you—I got carried away. There’s no one else I can talk to about how weird things have been lately—moving here, being unemployed, not having anywhere to live. I have terrible insomnia—”
She interrupted me. “Please don’t start.”
“Start what?”
“Telling me everything that’s wrong with your life. You’re just making it worse for yourself, and you have no idea how draining it is for everyone else.”
I was about to defend myself by explaining that my life really was messed up right now—that I wasn’t exaggerating—but stopped just in time. “We’ve been friends since we were fourteen,” I said. “You know I’m not always like this.”
She said nothing—passively disagreeing with me.
“You think I’ve always been draining?”
“You’ve always been intense,” she said. “Yes.”
In a matter of seconds, my closest girlhood friendship revised itself, then collapsed. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
She sighed, as though she couldn’t believe I didn’t already know. “Because I felt sorry for you.”
Sorry for me because my mother had cancer and was dying? Or because I was such a loser? I didn’t have the stomach to ask. “Well, you had me fooled,” I said, struggling to keep the hurt out of my voice.
“I better go,” said Alana, sounding relieved. “I’m sorry if I’ve upset you.”
I put the phone down. My jaw was stinging, about to crack. Pippa was heading toward me with a saucepan thrust out in front of her.
“You ate the last of the baked beans,” she said. “What’s Caleb going to have for dinner?”
I looked into the dirty saucepan. “Ari told me to eat them,” I said, backing away from her and trying to leave the room before I cried. Halfway up the first flight of stairs, I started to lose it, and by the time I had slammed the door to my room and flung myself on the bed, I was a puddle of childish sobs and dramatic, shivery wails.
Pippa had followed me up the stairs and started patting the bedclothes, trying to find me, but that only made me curl up in a ball and pull them more closely around myself. “It wasn’t my fault!” I cried out. “Leave me alone.”
“Listen to me, Suki,” said Pippa, whose persistence had finally gotten past the duvet. “I didn’t realize Ari told you to eat them.”
“Go away,” I said, covering my face.
“Come on, Suki, I’m just trying to help.”
“I don’t need your help,” I said, staying covered. I knew I was being ridiculous and immature, but it wasn’t enough to snap me out of it.
“You have to let someone in,” said Pippa.
Under the duvet, I froze, listening, cringing.
“I know you’ve had a hard life,” she continued. “But at some point you’ve just got to let it go and move on.”
I didn’t go downstairs again that night, and woke up the next morning on the floor of the attic bathroom with my legs stretched into the shower stall. A damp towel was wedged under my head and my shoulders were covered by a threadbare satin quilt, though I did not remember fetching either of them. When I pushed open Caleb’s door, his room was empty, his faded superhero bedspread in a heap on the floor. I looked in the mirror and hardly recognized the person there. Excessive crying had rinsed the color from my cheeks and left red rings around my eyes. Reluctantly I went downstairs, where Pippa was bustling in the kitchen, listening to a radio drama and cooking scrambled eggs. She said nothing about the night before and quickly turned down the radio when she saw me. “Sorry about the racket,” she said. “The Archers Omnibus is my only addiction. There’s coffee in the pot if you want some.”
“Thanks, it smells great.”
When I sat down at the table, she put a plate of scrambled eggs in front of me and told me to eat up. Dressed in his soccer kit, Caleb stomped in from somewhere and devoured his own plateful of eggs in about three mouthfuls. When Pippa went into the kitchen to fetch the coffeepot, he briefly looked over at me. “You were sleeping in the bathroom again,” he said.
“Did you put the quilt over me?”
“Don’t be stupid.” I thought he looked a little flustered when Pippa came back, but I didn’t challenge him. I was too tired, too shamed. Caleb got up, left his dirty plate on the table, and tied a sweatshirt round his hips, preparing to leave.
“Are you playing on Wormwood Scrubs again?” said Pippa.
Caleb ignored her.
“Please don’t go near the prison,” she said, as if he had responded. “And don’t hang about afterward smoking—even if that’s what the other chaps do.” Caleb rolled his eyes, but Pippa continued, still undaunted, “And if it starts to rain, shelter in a bus stop until it passes.”
“For God’s sake, Mum, it’s the middle of summer.” Caleb was already in the doorway, but he paused there and smiled sweetly. “Can I have a fiver for lunch after the game? A bunch of the guys are getting burgers.” He picked up Pippa’s purse from the hall table and handed it to her.
“I wish you’d get something healthy,” said Pippa, passing him a tenner, and gratefully receiving her reward, a peck on her cheek. When he’d gone, she said, “He’s a little sod, but I can’t bring myself to say no to him. One day, when you’re a mother, you’ll understand.”
She seemed sad, resigned, and I felt ashamed at having behaved so childishly the evening before. “I’m sorry about last night,” I said. “My best friend dumped me.”
While Pippa listened, I recounted my conversation with Alana, and began to understand a little of what Alana had been trying to tell me. The epiphany was an uncomfortable one; a glaring blind spot had been shown to me, and my first thought was that I wanted to see Alana and behave in a different way. Only it was too late for that. Even if she agreed to meet up, it would be futile to try to get her to change her mind about me. I could be different in the next friendship, but that one was history.
Pippa thought so too. “Not all friendships last. Do you remember Lulu? Impossibly long legs, and a gorgeous face to go with them . . .”
“Of course,” I said. “She came to a party at our flat. I think my dad had a crush on her.”
Pippa laughed. “Everyone had a crush on her—she was exquisite, and a total nightmare to be best friends with. If you ever fancied a bloke, you couldn’t let her within a hundred miles of him.”
And yet it had been Pippa who’d scored at my parents’ party. “That was a wild night,” I said. “Or at least it seemed that way to me.”
Pippa drummed her fingers excitedly on the table. “Oh yes! That party. Lulu was a little minx that night.” She blushed. “And so was I.”
“I suppose she’s married now too, with kids?”
“I don’t know,” said Pippa. “I haven’t seen her for about ten years.”
I was surprised, and then sad. “How did that happen?”
“Lulu always had men hanging off her—miniskirts and stilettos were invented for girls like her—but she could never make anything last. I don’t even think she liked men all that much. When we were young, it didn’t matter, it was all just fun. But we got older, and everyone settled down except her. She kept on partying, not just at the weekends but all the time. I think she started doing lots of coke, and fell in with a crowd in King’s Cross who were into hard drugs. Whenever I bumped into her, she asked me for money, and if I didn’t give her any, she’d take off. The last time I saw her she was sitting outside a tube station—I went up to talk to her—and she was so out of it she didn’t even recognize me.”
“And that was the last time you saw her?”
Pippa was rueful for a moment, lost in reminiscence. “I think she might have overdosed, but I’d rather not know.”
We began to reminisce about the babysitting days, and Pippa’s description of me was one I hardly recognized. “You were very high spirited,” she said. “Always dressing up and entertaining everyone with your imaginary worlds.”
I wondered what had happened to her, this other, more charming me, whether she was gone for good or if it was possible to revive her—if she was in fact waiting patiently to be brought back to life.
Not two days later, Caleb decided to exert his will on a larger scale. The first sign of trouble was his persistent uncooperativeness in packing, even though the family was leaving in three days and would be gone for a month. At first Pippa thought he couldn’t be bothered, but when she started doing it for him, he sabotaged her efforts and hid all the clothes she had packed. Then, when his passport went missing, Caleb said he knew nothing about it, but after turning his room upside down, Ari found the missing passport tucked into an old comic. When they confronted him about what he was up to, Caleb announced he wasn’t going to Greece. Ari was furious and took a swing at Caleb before Pippa got in the way and tried to calm things down. Then Ari exploded at both of them.
I heard nothing more about it until Pippa knocked on my door, late, two nights later. She said she hadn’t discussed it yet with Ari but she had been thinking that it might not be so bad if Caleb stayed in London with me. I thought it was a terrible idea, but I just said, “Does Caleb know about your plan?”
“It was his idea,” she said. “At first I thought it was too much responsibility to put on you. But then I came round to the idea. You might be a good influence on him—he might open up once we’re not around.”
“And Ari?” There was no use trying to talk Pippa out of it—I could tell she had already relented—and I was grabbing at the only straw I could think of.
“He’ll get over it. The second he sits down to an ouzo with his brother.”
Two days later, with Ari in a funk, they left without Caleb. I took them to the airport, and drove the car back on my own. I had never driven before in London and it took me twice as long to get back as it had to get out there; I followed the wrong lane out of a roundabout, and wound up south of the river in a suburb that might have been Putney or Barnes. By the time I got back to the flat, it was dark, and Caleb was hunched in front of the TV in the living room with the lights off, frantically pushing buttons on a gaming console. On the screen, a lone high school jock was fighting off an army of bloated, pale green Samurai warriors. I picked up the box next to the console. “Samurai Zombies?”
“Promise you won’t tell Mum. She thinks it’s too violent.”
“I expect I’ll tell her right away—the instant she calls.”
“What?” he said, losing concentration long enough to meet a grisly end. “Fuck!” he said. “I was nearly on the next level.”
“I’m not going to promise anything.”
“What?” He looked at me again—shocked that I had disagreed with him—but I had decided, on the way back from the airp
ort, that the only way I could survive the next month was to show him who was boss.
“You heard me,” I said, and went upstairs.
Ari had told me I could use the car while they were away, but in Central London there was no point in driving, so I went into their bedroom to leave the keys there. Their room looked like a rogue tornado had passed through, and I wondered if I ought to tidy up, just a little. I hadn’t really been in their bedroom before and couldn’t resist looking round and trying out the bed, which was an enormous king-size futon, of the kind I hadn’t seen since the late nineties. The futon hadn’t been made, and the bedding smelled a little funky, but after all the sleepless nights I’d had, it was devilishly inviting, and I lay down on it, meaning to rest only for a moment. But once I was lying down, all the exhaustion of the last few weeks arrived at once, and I succumbed to a kind of half coma. Must get up, I told myself as I relived the day as a sequence of increasingly wonky moments—getting squashed by Peggy’s antique trunk in the back of the car, catching a plane with no wings, driving off the side of Putney Bridge . . . and then, as I got really woozy, I imagined someone was lying next to me on the futon, a man who smelled of Christmas morning—that delicious aroma I remembered from when I was a kid. I didn’t know who the man was, but he smelled so good that when he rolled over and started to kiss me, I put my hand on the small of his back and pressed my mouth into his. All at once the man’s back narrowed, and the bones shrank under his skin, and I realized he was a boy, that it was Caleb I was kissing–Caleb who tasted so good.
It was such a vivid, startling dream that it propelled me out of sleep and off the bed in the same instant. My pulse raced as I looked around the room, but it was empty, static. No one else had been in the bed except me. The door was still closed, and beyond it I could hear the steady click, click, beep of a gaming console downstairs. It was nothing more than a dream, I told myself, just a man morphing into a boy who happened to be Caleb.
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